Ethereum GPU mining on AWS EC2 in 2017

Cryptocurrency mining is as popular as ever, as it in theory allows you to turn idle computing resources into a passive income. The problem is, that these days you require extremely powerful, specifically optimized hardware as well as access to very cheap or even free electricity.

Testing on EC2

To determine just how difficult mining has become, I’ve decided to run a GPU miner on an Amazon AWS EC2 g2.8xlarge. This particular cloud instance is significantly faster than the hardware most people have at home, yet it is not specifically optimized for Cryptocurrency mining - the ideal candidate.

Specs & Details

High Frequency Intel Xeon E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge) Processors (32 vCPU)

4x NVIDIA GRID K520 (1,536 CUDA cores and 4GB of video memory)

60GB of Memory, 2x120GB of SSD Storage

The Server costs $2.6 per hour ($62.4/day; $1860/month)

1 Ethereum sells for $10.76 (2017-02-03)

Tip: With AWS EC2 spot pricing, you can get the server for around $0.4777 / hour, depending on time of day, region and availability zone. That’s $343,94 / month.

Results

The hash rate of the EC2 server fluctuates between 23.3 MH/s and 47.7 MH/s. I suspect the performance varies based on what other users do on this shared, EC2 server. In any case, the results give us a good idea of what to expect when you run a miner on hardware that’s not specifically designed for mining.

Based on average hash rate of 28 MH/s, each EC server would generate around 0.0045 Ether ($0.05) in income per hour. That means, over the course of a month you’d make $34.84 (3.25 Ether).

Conclusion

After around a week of EC2 mining, I have now shut down all AWS server. The Spot pricing I’ve been pursuing helped keep cost down but remains too expensive to be profitable.

Paid On

From Block

To Block

Duration [h]

Amount

2017-02-13T18:08:44

3176203

3176833

2.6

0.09699 ETH

2017-02-13T15:33:08

3175670

3176197

2.2

0.09554 ETH

2017-02-13T13:18:20

3175075

3175662

2.2

0.09745 ETH

2017-02-13T11:06:35

3174454

3175067

2.4

0.09614 ETH

2017-02-13T08:42:46

3173879

3174450

2.3

0.1004 ETH

2017-02-13T06:27:19

3173352

3173865

2

0.09774 ETH

2017-02-13T04:28:20

3172641

3173349

3.1

0.09724 ETH

2017-02-13T01:24:22

3171962

3172630

2.7

0.0955 ETH

2017-02-12T22:43:51

3171360

3171955

2.4

0.0962 ETH

2017-02-12T20:18:45

3170701

3171333

2.4

0.09535 ETH

2017-02-12T17:54:44

3170230

3170697

1.9

0.09745 ETH

2017-02-12T15:59:33

3169628

3170216

2.5

0.09691 ETH

2017-02-12T13:29:43

3169141

3169617

1.9

0.10045 ETH

2017-02-12T11:34:53

3168562

3169138

2.3

0.10078 ETH

2017-02-12T09:14:53

3168014

3168556

2.2

0.0972 ETH

2017-02-12T07:03:15

3167437

3167999

2.2

0.09754 ETH

2017-02-12T04:48:24

3166852

3167434

2.4

0.09501 ETH

2017-02-12T02:21:34

3166292

3166838

2.1

0.09638 ETH

2017-02-12T00:14:57

3165750

3166277

2.1

0.09927 ETH

2017-02-11T22:10:29

3165252

3165747

1.9

0.09592 ETH

Update: 2017-05-22

As of today, Ethereum is valued at 1 ETH = 173.8 USD. However, due to enormous demand, EC2 spot pricing is nowhere near what I paid in early 2017. Mining on AWS EC2 is and will remain unprofitable - forever.

Q&A

EC2 Elastic GPU service

What about using the recently launched Amazon EC2 Elastic GPU service. What is the potential for mining with this service? - M.

The Amazon EC2 Elastic GPU services comes with a number of severe limitations, that make it unsuitable for mining cryptocurrency. Here’s what I’ve noticed:

The GPU is attached via network (latency, bandwidth usage)

You can attach only 1x Elastic GPU to each EC2 instance

This services requires a special driver which only supports OpenGL 4.2

Dual-Mining

What is Dual-Mining? What is considered baseline, the AWS instance cost? - D.

DUAL stands for dual-mining. That means, that you are concurrently mining 2 or more currencies. For example, you could be mining Ethereum (ETH) and Siacoin (SC) together, thus making a higher profit compared to only mining Ethereum. The baseline is ETH + SIA, so mining only ETH would generate around 27% less profit.

Appreciate the time I spend on this? Send a thanks to (ETH):
0x031FE3346207DEF2EB9dDc4b19A621a85B554D9f

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